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Learn how one educator is using a smartpen to make writing more fun…and hopefully more productive!

I still love to write thing by hand, on paper, in a notebook. Call it a holdover from my days (and nights) spent writing in journals and diaries and notebooks. I always had a notebook and pen with me. I was always writing.

Now I have my iPhone with me, and I tweet a whole lot.

But writing out drafts, or brainstorming, or jotting down ideas, those are activities that I miss doing. What I don’t miss doing in transcribing them, or not having access to them if I don’t happen to have the right notebook (or, more often than not these days, post-it note) with me when I needed it.

For Christmas, I got theLivescribe 3 Pen and Notebook set. The pen connects through Bluetooth to an app in your phone or tablet, and as you write on the special notebook pages, it appears instantaneously in the app. Select snippets of the text, swipe to the right, and it OCRs it as text. With the deluxe starter package, you get a free one-year subscription to Evernote Premium along with your pen and special paper.

It has a number of useful features: you can send the pages to Dropbox, Google Drive, and other cloud-based platforms. And if you don’t have your phone or tablet with you when you are writing, it immediately syncs up the next time you pair the pen with the app. You can also send them as a text message, which means I could, theoretically,tweet from my notebook.

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FastCompany has a great article about how you can reprogram your brain and live a better life by writing a few things down….and if you use a Livescribe smartpen, you’ll have your notes available where ever you go!

WRITING EXERCISES SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN TO REDIRECT YOUR LIFE

NEED TO FIND A NEW DIRECTION OR RECLAIM INSPIRATION? GRAB A PEN AND PAPER. THESE WRITING EXERCISES CAN HELP.

We’re total suckers for self improvement: The self-help industry brings inbillions of dollarseach year from countless books. All that encouraging advice can feel empowering and commonsensical, offering a simple path to a better life.

But there’s a problem with this approach. “Reading a self-help book is like buying a lottery ticket,”writes social psychologist Timothy Wilsonin his newest bookRedirect. “For a small investment, we get hope in return; the dream that all our problems will soon be solved without any real expectation that they will be.”

While the power of positive thinking—the seeming bread and butter of self-help as we know it—is a nice thought, according to Wilson, there’s no evidence that simply thinking positively actually works. We can’t just will ourselves to be happier a-laThe Secret.“Our minds aren’t that stupid,” says Wilson. “It’s not like you can just tell you mind, ‘Think positively.’ You’ve got to nudge it a little more along.”